Victim Of Time, Vandals

A Piece Of History Falls

It was a sad moment last week when Broward County pioneer Charles Forman learned that his childhood home, one of this area`s historical sites, had been torn down.

What even the legendary hurricane of 1926 couldn`t do, vandals and termites did. His old home, the long abandoned wood-frame lockkeeper`s house on the North New River Canal along State Road 84 at Davie Road, fell under the axes and hammers of South Florida Water Management District crews.

``We`ve had numerous problems with vandalism and kids starting fires,`` said J.C. Cumming, assistant superintendant of the district`s Fort Lauderdale field station. ``Despite the fence around it, kids would use it for parties and stuff like that. Vandals were tearing out the inside weight-bearing walls, so there was the danger of the roof collapsing. Termites were eating out the insides. It was a liability.``

Forman, 71, a former member of the Broward County School Board and state Board of Regents, said he had hoped the old house would become a museum.

``This is the first indication I had that anyone planned to tear it down,`` he said. ``We thought it would be permanent. It`s one of the few really basic historic buildings around and it did serve a major economic function in the development of Fort Lauderdale and the opening of Lake Okeechobee.

``I`m very disappointed to learn the building was destroyed, but I`m sure the water management folks had a very good reason. We were going to restore the house and fix it up and eventually make a little museum of it.``

Although the adjacent locks are a national historic site, the house isn`t, Cumming said.

The water management district, which was aware of the historical significance of the house, helped save what it could, Cumming said.

Gerry Witoshynsky, president of the Pembroke Pines Historical Society and a member of the Broward County Historical Commission, looked behind every nook and cranny for things to save. Crews helped in her salvaging mission, tearing doors off hinges, taking apart windows and removing doorknobs.

Saved were pulleys, sashes and weights from the windows, textured lavender doorknobs, doors and glass used in the windows, among other items.

``They`ll go to the historical commission to examine to see if they should be preserved,`` she said. ``They represent the typical early Florida house, very simple, very sound and, like this doorknob, very beautiful.``

Forman`s father had been the first lockkeeper on the first canal to link the coastal areas with the interior of Florida. The house for the lockkeeper, like the canal, was completed in 1912. It cost $750 to build, according to Cooper Kirk, historian for the historical commission.

``When they completed the locks, Papa was the first locktender, as well as a farmer,`` Forman said. ``I lived there the first three years of my life.``

His father, Hamilton McLure Forman, an Illinois lawyer prevented from practicing because of an eye injury, had moved to Broward in 1910 as a farmer. When the canal opened, he took the $45-a-month job that included opening the locks for boats and collecting tolls, Kirk said.

The locks that Forman operated, Kirk said, were the door to the Everglades. With no roads, the canal was the only way to get through the swamps and woods of Florida`s interior. All fertilizer, livestock, fuel and people passed through them.

The locks, Kirk said, still act as the barrier to prevent intrusion of salt water into the interior.

Although the locks still serve a function, the canal became obsolete in 1917, when the first rock road was built, Forman said.

``Papa quit and went into the dairy business,`` he said. ``We lived there for the first years of its operation, when all produce, everything, had to go through the locks. It is quite a historical thing.``